How to support "web continuations" of episodes (like the daily show or real time with bill maher)

Help & Support
1

I’ll jump straight to the bottom line of this post - I want to know how to get NZBDrone to download two separate pieces of the same episode (the regular one and the “overtime” one that airs on the web), name them identically save for adding -part1.mkv and -part2.mkv so that Plex/XBMC will play them back correctly.

Now then, I started this thread in help & support, as I’m not sure if what I’m trying to do is already supported (I’m new to nzbdrone, very impressed so far, been a long time sb user).

So, The Daily Show and Real Time with Bill Maher are two shows I love, and also two shows that do something SickBeard totally doesn’t support, and I was really hoping NZBDrone would be able to support (man SB’s devs are stubborn and won’t even entertain this discussion, I tried!).

The situation is this - a show airs, then later, the web continuation airs. The question is - how can/should this be handled. The bottom line is how the media players handle it. Plex/XBMC support the idea of a part1/part2, which works fine (although not exactly the same, but good enough). However, since SB has never supported anything remotely like this, I had to manually download the web continuation, rename the original episode and the continuation to be the exact same save for a -Part1 and -Part2 after the episode numbers, looking like this:

Real.Time.with.Bill.Maher.2014.02.28-Part1.mp4
Real.Time.with.Bill.Maher.2014.02.28-Part2.mp4
Real.Time.with.Bill.Maher.2014.03.14-Part1.mp4
Real.Time.with.Bill.Maher.2014.03.14-Part2.mkv

That way, when Plex/XBMC sees this, they bond the two files together to make one entity that plays back all together as thought it were one contiguous file.

So, my question is how can NZBDrone download these two separate pieces of the same episode and name them like -part1 and -part2 exactly as described above so that Plex/XBMC will handle it correctly.

Thanks,

e&a

2

Drone doesn’t support a/b episodes for the same episode, nor does it support storing multiple files for the same episode on disk.

Where are you sourcing the continuations? I watch The Daily Show and most copies I get have the interview cutoff (edited for its timeslot), but the occasional WEB-DL that I’ve gotten contains the full interview. I’ve never investigated past that, but it seems that the WEB-DL releases are the ones to get.

How are you acquiring the continuation parts?

3

Well, I guess move this to the Feature Requests section - sorry for the mis-categorization.

I suspect this feature could be a solid differentiator over the next 5-10 years as network television is dragged onto the web kicking and screaming. In the case of Real Time with Bill Maher, the separate episodes are actually called “Overtime”, like this, taken from oznzbd result for the search maher overtime:

Real Time with Bill Maher 2014 01 17 Overtime 540p WEB-DL AAC2
real time with bill maher 2013 11 08 overtime WEB-DL 480p AAC2
real time with bill maher 2013 10 11 overtime WEB-DL 480p AAC2

4

There are a couple problems with this show and its Overtime releases.

  1. tvdb has them lumped in as specials, but given their rules and the fact that its not a special then it makes sense (Quite Interesting has the same issue with their extended episodes), due to this drone can’t easily differentiate which episode to use when it uses the date to find it.

  2. The naming, if it was listed as another show it would be easier, but its not and drone would have to know too much about this particular show in order to handle it.

This isn’t an easy problem to solve and at this time now something we’re looking to work on.

6

Hey guys, good news! I know this is an old topic but after doing a pretty deep dive online and finding nothing it turns out the solution is now very simple.

All that’s necessary is to add “pt1” and “pt2” to the end of the filename (or “pt3” etc if more additions)

In the case of Bill Mahers “Overtime” web extra you would do this:
Real Time With Bill Maher 2015 s13e01 pt1.mp4 and Real Time With Bill Maher 2015 s13e01 pt2.mp4

For The Daily Shows web extra it would be:
The Daily Show 2015 s20e01 pt1.mp4 and The Daily Show 2015 s20e01 pt2.mp4

You get the idea.

There’s no longer any need to separate them into different folders or anything. What will happen is you’ll see the exact same listings under TV or whatever you call that folder but if you look at the running time you’ll see the extra has been added.

Since this is the only place anywhere online - including the Plex forums - that I found this addressed I really hope this helps someone.

*This is a Plex database solution since the OP specifically was asking about the listing working for Plex. Not sure if this would work with other servers.

Cheers!

7

Just be aware that Sonarr doesn’t support A/B parts for the same episode, so its not going to list both in the UI and will overwrite one of them if you try to import it via CDH or Drone Factory.